American politics

Water woes

Quiet conservationists

"YOU can't create water, just like people can't create gold or coal or oil. That's nature's business," said John DeLaney, a pecan farmer in Comanche, Texas. "You might be able to conserve it." But when I asked the logical follow-up question—whether he himself is a conservationist—Mr DeLaney demurred. "I don't know what you mean by conservationist." "Do you try to conserve water when you're irrigating?" I asked. "Well certainly! Anybody with any sense does that," he said, and explained that, if you had a three-month supply of food in your icebox and knew it had to last you three months, you would naturally ration your snacking.

One of the interesting aspects of researching Texas's looming water issues—more on which in the coming print edition—is that on this issue some of the usual political divides are not so much bridged as simply moot. As Mr DeLaney says, anybody with any sense can see that the state is parched. Most of Texas has been blanketed in a severe drought all year. Crops are dying, cattle are being sold off, cracks have opened up in the ground, and one town has actually started recycling its sewer water for drinking. But even if it started pouring tomorrow, the issue is to some extent structural: the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) projects that, because the state's population is growing and its available supplies are dwindling, the state will need an additional 8.3m acre-feet of water by 2060—a nearly 30% increase in demand.

Under such conditions, there is little room for ignoring the issue, even if the cost of accessing more water will be considerable and even if the water experts have a tendency to talk about climate change more than is otherwise considered acceptable to some Texans. The TWDB's draft water plan for 2012 puts the cost of recommended improvements at more than $53 billion, and is candid about the impacts of climate variability: "If temperatures rise and precipitation decreases, as projected by climate models, Texas would begin seeing droughts in the middle of the 21st century that are as bad or worse as those in the beginning or middle of the 20th century."

Acceptance, of course, is not as good as action, and whether Texas will realise its goals with regard to water remains to be seen. The state doesn't have $53 billion laying around. But perhaps the markets can be invoked to realise some gains. A statewide election today includes a couple of ballot initiatives designed to address the long-term water outlook; one of them, Proposition 8, would offer landowners a property tax break for implementing certain conservationist measures—an attempt to use incentives to override inertia.

And if the markets are not enough, then maybe some muscle can be used. Troy Fraser, a Republican state senator from Horseshoe Bay and chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, says that he's been telling oil and gas guys they need to clean up the water they use so it can be used again—fracking a gas well requires about a million gallons of freshwater a pop—and that if they won't do it voluntarily, they could face some new legislation in the next session. He took a stern view of their complaints about the burdens of doing so: "It's not a matter of not being cost-competitive. It's just they wouldn't make as much money." Manufacturers, he allowed, have a more serious complaint; if water becomes more expensive in Texas, it might be cheaper for factories to move to soggier states. Still, Mr Fraser has a response for them. "The response is, there's a finite amount of water available," he says. Firm but fair, and an increasingly common view. Out west, as they say, whisky is for drinking and water is for fighting over. It may also be that water is worth fighting for.

"Troy Fraser, a Republican state senator from Horseshoe...took a stern view of [business] complaints about the burdens of [conserving water]: 'It's not a matter of not being cost-competitive. It's just they wouldn't make as much money."

Damn liberal.

There ain't nothin' in the Constitution which says that some liberal bureaucrat from Austin can go around tellin' God-fearin' Americans what to do with resources from our Maker, Amen.

One of the reasons that Europeans tend to accept the reality of climate change to a much greater extent than Americans is that the impacts of climate change are already being felt there, since most of Europe is much closer to the North Pole than the US and has thus experienced more warming. The brutal winters of my wife's childhood in Lithuania are long gone. Wildfires on the scale of last year's Russian conflagration just did *not* happen.

The most aggressive American opponents of the idea of anthropogenic global warming--and frequently of climate change, full stop--tend to be from the Great Plains (which includes Texas) and the intermountain West. It just happens that these are precisely the areas that are going to suffer most from climate change-induced water shortages. Permanent drought might well change a lot of minds.

I'm not a Texan - nor a Republican, for that matter - but I suspect that if I WERE a Texan Republican, I'd probably rather my local representative say something that goes against ideological lines than leave me without water.

(I know you were kidding, but I still just have to find some way to express my relief post-Tea Party, etc)

Reminds me of when Ted Kennedy opposed wind farms in Nantucket. Or when Republicans say that Americans will do jobs that illegal immigrants do if only they were paid a "living wage." Or when OWS stopped serving gourmet food in Zuccotti Park because they got pissed at the freeloaders. Or when Republicans talk about wasteful government spending while supporting the F-35 alternative engine program.

I actually sympathize. It really is different if it affects me and my family and friends. Capital punishment opponents become proponents when the victim is a loved one. Free traders become protectionists when it's your pocketbook that's taking a hit. Blood is thicker than whatever politicians excrete. And it's impossible to police unless we prohibit politicians from having families or owning property which is what the Catholic Church did to combat nepotism. I say that in jest but it would be interesting to observe a modern democratic system where politicians are selected from a priestly class who considered their legislative duties to be sacred. Short of that, I think all we can do is dilute the power of politicians so that on any given issue, the self-interested few can't enact or veto policies.

Some people are always looking for an excuse to "price externalities" so long as it's the price of fossil fuels we're raising and not, say... water. From an economic POV, the correct way to deal with water shortages, including shortages due to fracking, would be to price the water.

Whoa there, big fella! You missed an economic point: if fracking uses a million gallons per well, then it's in competition for water resources and not making that cost part of the equation is a direct subsidy. It's an externality that needs to be put into the cost equation. If that makes the gas more expensive, then it's merely pricing the gas closer to actual market cost.

I have this naive notion that all resources should be priced at their actual delivered cost with externalities factored in. I imagine this would result in things called efficiency, wise use, and perhaps even fairness.

Politics and their bastard children subsidies are the things which usually get in the way.

There are also newer fracking technologies that use no water on the verge of being commercialized. One of the newer ones uses supercritical propane as the fluid medium, eliminating the need for water resources. The gaseous propane from the wellhead can then be easily refrigerated out of the stream and extracted during processing with the rest of the NGLs.

Then again, a whole lot of people distrust all gas companies enough that they're willing to spread half-baked speculation even when the technology is safer and less likely to pollute. I saw an article in an upstate New York newspaper that suggested that supercritical propane fracking would be more dangerous "because we store propane outside in tanks." No oxygen, no boom, pal.

It's kinda the same mentality that opponents of fluoridated water use when they say that fluoride is "rat poison," even though the relative concentration of fluoride in rodenticide is hundreds of thousands of times that found in a municipal water supply. Look, vitamin C will screw up your kidneys if take 5000mg of it every day for a year, but who does that?

No atheists in foxholes and no partisans behind a plow. Everyone's a centrist when they know what they mean. Reality's been hard on ideology since man first made an arrow and realized they could be pointed at someone else. Fools who ought to get back to the polls speak in adages.

Governor Perry's policies are in part to blame; there was abundant evidence of need for investment in water infrastructure a few years back. Like the cuts in funding to Texas' other environmental management priorities (see wildfires) it was and is the epitome of penny wise, pound foolish.

I am saddened that hearing conservatives talk about environmental conservation is perceived as eating crow - even if it really is that way. I want to believe that there are conservatives out there willing to embrace Teddy Roosevelt's tradition.

One of the few political groups that I am willing to donate to is the apparently oxymoronic Republicans for Environmental conservation. Every other environmental lobby I've found either is either a shill for global warming denialists, a front for agribusinesses with interests in corn ethanol, or spouts anti-nuclear energy hysteria.

I remember a chain of lawsuits in Phoenix about water in a reservoir that had been earmarked to keep the Rio Grande flowing in the area to preserve a species of endangered water snakes. Phoenix sued and a lot of folks were making a fuss about the judge stealing their drinking water for the damned snakes. The funny thing was that water use in Phoenix was something like 320 gallons a day per person. In Santa Fee down the road, it was 150 mostly because the mindless bureaucrats there had apparently looked out the window and noticed they were living in a desert. Phoenix was worried in part because the city was still growing fast, but also because they had pumped the aquifer under the city so nearly dry that they were afraid the ground under the city was going to start collapsing, as it had in other similar situations. Nobody was brave enough to suggest that maybe if you want to live in the desert, you might need to do without your bluegrass lawn, or even begin to consider pricing the water, above a certain low level, to reflect its scarcity in a desert.

Ah Beng beat me to it, but yeah, you don't need water for fracking anymore. Can't they building desalinization plants with all that nat gas coming out? Since drought is not going anywhere, might be a worthwhile infrastructure project. Think of all them jobs!

I would note that in San Antonio and greater area supported by the Edwards Aquafer, we eforce conservation via rationing overseen by the Edwards Aquafer Authority. We are currently in Stage II drought restrictions which mandate a 30% decrease in water use or face steep fines. I doubt that anyone in Austin even recognizes the lengths south central Texans go to "conserve" its water. Proposition 8 was a dissembling joke that deserved to be voted down. Water can't be a liberal/conservative issue...it is one of common sense survival and it should be addressed outside of the political shenanegans discussed in these posts.

The ending punchline makes little to no sense. "Whisky is for drinking, and water is for fighting over. Is may also be that water is worth fight for." Are you distinguishing between fighting "over" and "for"? Weak. One thing is clear: lots of fighting with regards to water.